Broadband Forum Liaison To

Broadband Forum Liaison To:

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): HomeNet, EMAN
David Sinicrope (Liaison Manager), Mark Townsley (HomeNet lead), Benoit Claise (EMAN lead), Bruce Nordman (EMAN lead), Ralph Droms (Area Director), Jari Arkko (Area Director)

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From:

Christophe Alter
Broadband Forum Technical Committee Chair
()

Liaison CommunicatedBy:
Tim Spets (Motorola Mobility) and Lindsay Frost (NEC).

Please reply to:
Greg Bathrick, Co-Chair of BroadbandHome working group,

Date:20thJuly 2011

Subject:New work items in Broadband Forum concerning Machine-to-Machine (M2M) solutions

Dear Chairman,

The Broadband Forum ( would like to discuss with your organization the benefits of providing solutions addressing M2M requirements and alignment of standardization activities in Connected Home technologies. The BBF develops multi-service broadband packet networking specifications addressing interoperability, architecture and management. Our work enables home, business and converged broadband services, encompassing customer, access and backbone networks. Our focus is on empowering converged packet networks worldwide to better meet the needs of vendors, service providers and their customers.

The BBF BroadbandHome working grouphas been working on topics relating to the ‘Connected Home' (see MR-239) which will likely have a relationship with M2M work from many other organizations. For example, the Broadband Forum has updated capabilities within CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP), defined in the TR-069 family of documents, that specify how connected home devices can be managed using a TR-069 proxy. This work is in final stages for public release.

The Broadband Forum BroadbandHome working group has furthermore decided to undertake two projects (described in the appendix to this letter):

• BBF OD-282Smart Home Control Plane Analysis - to analyze a problem statement and potential solution space through use cases and requirements for real-time control of devices in the Connected Home, including potentially by cloud applications.
• BBF OD-278Managing Machine-Type Devices using TR-069 - to analyze the use cases and requirements for provisioning and managing devices in the Connected Home.

The projects will from the beginning emphasize outreach to other SDOs, making an initial gap analysis regarding existing standards, and using a collaborative approach to planning any additional work required. Avoiding any overlaps with other organizations' activities is as much of a priority to the BBF as is addressing any gaps in solutions.

We believe that progressing connected home standardization in a timely manner is important, and therefore we have set an aggressive target completion date of mid October 2011 for completion of the Smart Home Control Plane Analysis. This also aligns with other activities that are occurring in the industry.

This schedule will also permit us, working in a coordinated manner with other industry standards forums, to initiate specific, targeted work items as early as Q4 2011.

In order to ensure the maximum degree of coordination and to minimize duplication of effort, the Broadband Forum would be very interested to receive information from you about your work in the above areas. Please feel free to contact Robin Mersh and Greg Bathrick with questions about this liaison. We look forward to working closely with your organization on these important topics.

Sincerely,

Christophe Alter,

Broadband Forum Technical Committee Chair

CC:

Christophe Alter, Broadband Forum Technical Committee Chair ()

Robin Mersh, Broadband Forum CEO ()

Gabrielle Bingham, Broadband Forum Secretariat ()

Greg Bathrick, Jason Walls, BroadbandHome working group chairs (, )

Date of Upcoming Broadband ForumMeetings

Note: A list of upcoming meetings can be found at

BBF OD-282 Smart Home Control Plane Analysis

Problem Statement:

In an emerging home networking landscape, devices critical for providing an infinite landscape of smart home services are connected in a variety of ways, using a variety of technologies, including IP and non-IP solutions.Connections to these devices with embedded and cloud applications are currently complex, proprietary and in some cases unavailable.

There is no current standard solution that provides a common mechanism to communicate real time device Control Plane commands to end devices from embedded and cloud applications providing Connected Home services.

Purpose:

The purpose of this work is to consider use cases and requirements for real-time command and control of embedded devices through user interfaces and applications, consider the work of other organizations in this area, providea straw man architecture for discussion, etc..

Scope:

The project has a focused short phase to explore standardization work ongoing in related M2M areas in other organizations, to ensure no direct overlap exists regarding solutions related to the problem statement.

It will also use requirements based on use cases and a straw man architecture to best describe the potential area of work and provide details to liaise with other standards bodies in this emerging work area.

Potential Solution Space:

Potential Solution(s) should provide applications the ability to communicate with devices with no knowledge of the underlying technology, via a single lightweight protocol interface that is extensible and open.

Potential solutions for the broadband enabled Connected Home industry may include defining a protocol to enable Control Plane communication between applications, cloud services and an emerging and diverse collection of home networking devices to provide a platform for Service Providers to add new services.

This effort should explore a common abstract platform for services that span many different device types that connect to the home network via many different technologies, without requiring changes to the underlying technologies.

Any potential solution should:

• Connect to all devices (IP and non-IP) providing a local end technology agnostic solution, allowing a common set of control commands for a particular device regardless of the end communication technology
• Ensure it provides an extensible set of control commands
• Be scalable
• Provide mechanisms for device discovery and communicating device capabilities
• Utilize existing standards for transport & security of remote connections
• Does not impact or provide device management already covered by CWMP
• Does not replace functions that are covered by devices’ existing technologies
• Does not require end-device modifications or modifications to end device technologies
• Does not define translation layer (left to implementations) to end device technologies

BBF OD-278 Managing Machine-Type Devices using TR-069

Problem Statement:

Development of global M2M services and deployment of devices requires reliable and interoperable means of discovering, provisioning, configuring and managing the devices and communication nodes/proxies involved. Broadband Forum is already globally active in related topics for managing aspects of Service Provider networks and of customer premises equipment. Can that "footprint", that existing expertise across many organizations and the existing family of protocols and data models be applied to M2M solutions? Should minor or major changes to existing BBF specifications be considered?

Purpose:

This project focuses on using existing BBF specifications for the management of devices, especially sensors and actuators.The goals are to show how BBF methods can already facilitate a wide range of business models and solutions involving management of machines, and to prepare necessary information for planning future improvements.

Scope:

In order to identify how BBF can contribute to such global M2M services, this project will:

• collect (noting their relevant market timeline) and prioritize current/future usage scenarios for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) solutions (and coordinate this work with the Marketing Group);
• identify overlapping or related standardization work in other fora/SDOs, emphasizing management aspects;
• identify impact on management due to unique aspects of network protocols critical to high-priority use cases;
• analyze the usage scenarios and component use cases in terms of O&M signaling compared to application signalling and data flow (e.g. real-time) and propose a demarcation
• propose the means of implementing the priority usage scenarios using existing Broadband Forum protocols and data models;
• identify those features/scenarios not currently implementable using BBF protocols, with a view to planning possible future work.

Potential Solution Space:

To facilitate discussions, the following diagram is offered as a very simplified straw man architecture. It is assumed here that all usage scenarios and use cases can be described in terms of a simplified set of five Actors and five communication paths, as shown in the figure. In the specifications of other organizations the functionality of the ACS might be implicit in the M2M Management system, but here it is made explicit. It is assumed that the communication paths can be by fixed or wireless (including cellular) connections.

Note that this project focuses on using communication paths Nr. 1,2,3 for discovery, provisioning, configuration and management of devices (A5) using where necessary TR-069 Proxies (A4).

The other Broadband Home project "Smart Home Control Plane Analysis" will investigate and define the communication path Nr. 5 (CP5) and also to some extent CP4, focusing on real-time aspects of control.

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